Subj : Re: WinXP
To   : Alan Zisman
From : Gordon Huff
Date : Mon Sep 12 2005 11:58 am

-=> Alan Zisman wrote to JAY EMRIE <=-

 -=> JAY EMRIE wrote to ROBERT FOWLER <=-

Let me jump into this too!

 RF> I had a brainstorm this afternoon thinking about Jay's predicament
 RF> with the Win95 USB laptop, and thought hey, maybe a Linux CD would
 RF> allow him to use his USB flash drive.

 JE> I'm a mite puzzled here. Admittedly I do not know Linux very well,
 JE> but how would a Linux CD help me with a system that does NOT have a CD
 JE> reader?

The thought is right but the details are confusing the situation.
Correct me if I'm wrong - but JE wants to run USB stuff on his laptop.

If JE wants to do this with Win95 - he's out of luck. Even the Win95 with
USB support doesn't work very well. Does the JE have adequate hardware
for USB? There is a USB test program from the USB industry association.

If JE has hardware that can run modern USB software, then he can follow
the RF outline :


 AZ> Robert is suggesting that if you first copy the \WIN95

No - he must mean the \win98 folder ... (Win98SE)

 AZ> folder from an
 AZ> install CD onto the flash drive using a system that had both a CD drive
 AZ> and usable USB ports. Next, boot the laptop to a live Linux CD (like

No - he must mean use a Linux Boot Disk/Rescue disk with USB support ...

 AZ> Knoppix for instance) you'll find that it will let you read and write
 AZ> to your laptop's FAT16 hard drive AND provide USB support, so you can
 AZ> access the USB flash drive.

 AZ> As a result, you could copy the contents of the flash drive onto the
 AZ> laptop's hard drive, then reboot to DOS and install from there.

I'd use my 2.5 -> 3.5 inch hard drive adapter ($5) and write the drive
in a desktop machine.....YMMV

 AZ> The potential problem, I suspect, is that the older laptop probably has
 AZ> 16-32 MB of RAM (I had one running W95A with 12 MB of RAM... it worked
 AZ> OK). If Linux runs at all with that little RAM, it may be very unhappy!
 
That's a problem allright. IIRC the Mandrake boot disk needs 32MB,
the Debian is OK with 12MB. TinyLinux? Tom'sRootBoot?

When you're done - does this laptop have enough resouces to do anything useful?
Maybe it's time to reduce it to e-mail and word processing.
Regards, Gordon
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